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How to hire an Amazon Web Services Engineer

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has taken the Internet by storm, so there’s no wonder why you’d want to hire an Amazon Web Services engineer. AWS’s 2016 revenue was over $12 billion in 2016 and continued to rise into 2017; why are so many companies turning towards Amazon Web Services?

Essentially, AWS is a cloud computing platform that offers many different services, the most popular of which being the Amazon EC2 and S3. Amazon Web Services charges based on usage, which means that the costs are fair both for small startups and large companies like Dropbox or Reddit.

This also means that AWS is perfect for scaling, whether you only need extensive server computation during busy hours or you just want your website to grow over the years, or even a combination of the two.

This pricing structure is one of the main reasons to utilize cloud computing, with AWS being one of the cheapest options while still offering an incredible amount of features. You can save a huge amount of money compared to traditional, on-premises servers and hardware because you only pay for what you need.

In addition to the cost savings, you would want to hire an Amazon Web Services engineer because of the incredibly high uptime AWS offers. The performance and reliability are unmatched by any traditional local hardware because you have the power of AWS behind you.

However, if you have invested a significant amount in your servers or are required to have specific information on-premises for compliance reasons but would still like to utilize cloud computing, AWS also offers hybrid computing. This allows you to use both on-premises and cloud services.

What are some other reasons you might want to hire an Amazon Web Services Engineer?

Performance

We’ve already talked about AWS’s public IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) clouds boast uptime 99.99% uptime, which means that you’ll almost never have to worry about your website or application going offline.

Strong security

Many people who do not yet utilize the cloud believe that it is less secure than using their hardware. But, in fact, AWS’s security in the cloud is recognized as more secure than on-premises solutions.

This is achieved through “broad security certification and accreditation, data encryption at rest and in-transit, hardware security modules, and strong physical security.” While there have been many notable leaks in the past, these are almost always because of user error, typically misconfigured S3 buckets.

Quick Deployment and Deep Features

AWS Features incredibly fast provisioning, from hours or days required on a traditional server to just minutes with Amazon Web Services. Additionally, they offer many in-depth features, including a wide range of database engines, encryption, server configurations, and numerous big data tools.

These features have been developed after years of working with both large and small businesses, so they can offer the tools that every company needs without having to spend too much time worrying about infrastructure.

AWS also offers CloudFormation, which allows you to begin with sample templates or create your own for any service or application architectures you want. Then, you can use these templates via AWS CloudFormation to have fast, reliable provisioning of the services or applications.

Best Amazon Web Services Interview Questions of 2018

With AWS’s flexibility, security, reliability, scalability, and cost-savings, almost everyone should be looking to hire an Amazon Web Services engineer.

If you want to have the best possible employee for your business without having to spend the time, money, and effort searching, contact us and let us find you a highly vetted expert. If you want to interview your potential AWS engineer, read ahead for the best interview questions to ask.

Keep in mind, though, that AWS offers many, many different services. Therefore, we’ll focus on the overall architecture to make sure your Amazon Web Services engineer to hire fully understands this cloud service.

How do you create a new security group in the Amazon EC2? Why do you need this?

This command should be simple for your Amazon Web Services Engineer to know: ec2-create-group CreateSecurityGroup. As you can see with the command, this creates a new security group with your account.

A security group functions similar to a firewall by controlling the traffic in and out of your instance, or the inbound and outbound traffic. After the group is created, it’s also possible for your AWS engineer to add different rules in it to make it even more secure.

If you have a distributed application that occasionally processes large volumes of data across multiple Amazon EC2 Instances, how can you recover gracefully from instance failures in the most cost effective way?

This question comes from Edureka and explains when your potential AWS engineer should use Spot instances. Spot instances are the correct option here because they have low rates and do not require a long term commitment.

In fact, by using Amazon EC2 Spot instances, you can save up to 90% on On-Demand prices. Spot instances “are spare compute capacity in the AWS cloud available…at steep discounts,” while still allowing you to “scale your application’s throughput up to 10X for the same budget.”

A good time to use EC2 Spot is the things like test and development environments, image renderings, or other fault-tolerant and flexible applications.

Explain the difference between stopping an instance and terminating an instance

If you simply stop an instance, it performs a normal shutdown by entering the stopping state and then transitions to the stopped state. AWS does not charge any usage or data transfer fees for the instance after it is stopped. However, they do continue to charge for the storage of Amazon EBS volumes.

While the instance is in the stopped state, it’s possible to modify some of its attributes, such as the instance type. All Amazon EBS volumes stay attached and your engineer is able to restart the instance later.

If the instance is terminated, however, it doesn’t simple move to a stopped state. Once you no longer have a use for the instance, you can terminate it to stop incurring charges for it. To protect your instances against accidental deletions, you can enable termination protection to stop your engineer from being allowed to terminate the instance using the console, CLI, or API.

Once it’s terminated, it stays visible in the console for a short amount of time and then it is automatically deleted, and it’s impossible to connect to or recover a terminated instances, so you need to be careful with this command.

You can also use the InstanceinitiatedShutdownBehavior on any Amazon EBS-backed instance to control if the instance stops or terminates when you initial shutdown from within the instance itself. The default is to simply stop the instance.

Additionally, you can use the DeleteOnTermination attribute on any Amazon EBS volume to determine whether the volume is deleted or preserved when the instance it is attached to is terminated. For more information about the instance lifecycle, see Amazon’s explanation.

Hire an Amazon Web Services Engineer

Now you know both why you should hire an Amazon Web Services engineer and the best interview questions to ask to make sure they truly understand this cloud provider. To bypass all the work of the hiring process and still get the best possible engineer, contact us.

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